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Lädt ... Disappearing Earth (2019)von Julia Phillips
   Keine aktuelle Diskussion zu diesem Buch.  buecherwurm1310 | Feb 20, 2021 | 
...the mystery (which turns out to have quite a few twists; it's worth reading until the very end) isn't everything, either. As Phillips has said in interviews, her book is a means of exploring the violence in women's lives, violence in many forms: The aforementioned widowing, which occurs when a man dies in a car accident on an icy road. Domestic violence in all its abusive forms. Abduction, rape, keeping secrets. As the many characters live through the calendar year, they appear in each others' stories, bit by bit. If you're paying attention, you may figure who took the girls. There will be those eager to designate “Disappearing Earth” a thriller by focusing on the whodunit rather than what the tragedy reveals about the women in and around it. And if there is a single misstep in Phillips’s nearly flawless novel, it arrives with the tidy ending that seems to serve the needs of a genre rather than those of this particularly brilliant novel. But a tidy ending does not diminish Phillips’s deep examination of loss and longing, and it is a testament to the novel’s power that knowing what happened to the sisters remains very much beside the point. The ending of “Disappearing Earth” ignites an immediate desire to reread the chapters leading up to it: incidents and characters that seemed trivial acquire new meanings. The novel’s title comes from a scary story that Alyona tells her sister in the very first chapter, about a village on a bluff overlooking the ocean which is suddenly washed away by a tsunami. This story will be retold by the novel’s close, just as the novel will retell itself. What appears to be a collection of fragments, the remains of assorted personal disasters and the detritus of a lost empire, is in truth capable of unity. For the heirs of all that wreckage, discovering that they have the ability to achieve this unity—that they have had it all along—is the one great act of detection required of them. Storytelling is a major thread here, with the telling of stories starting and ending the book, and appearing throughout. Disappearing Earth is closer to a traditional novel than Elizabeth Strout’s Anything is Possible or Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, but its use of storytelling functions in much the same way, each chapter a story unto itself, the stories layered on top of those that came before, the threads and themes accruing as the book builds. The book never utilizes a point-of-view more than once. One of the downsides of this type of novel, of course, is that in not returning to characters and their particular stories, the reader may feel dissatisfied. In later stories, we catch glimpses or hear whispers of what’s happened to earlier characters, but there is a suspension here, a feeling of loss. This structure, though, nicely speaks to the loss of the girls, and allows that sense of incompletion to underscore the possibility that there may not be an ending at all, much less one that is fulfilling. Storytelling is a major thread here, with the telling of stories starting and ending the book, and appearing throughout. Disappearing Earth is closer to a traditional novel than Elizabeth Strout’s Anything is Possible or Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, but its use of storytelling functions in much the same way, each chapter a story unto itself, the stories layered on top of those that came before, the threads and themes accruing as the book builds. The book never utilizes a point-of-view more than once. One of the downsides of this type of novel, of course, is that in not returning to characters and their particular stories, the reader may feel dissatisfied. In later stories, we catch glimpses or hear whispers of what’s happened to earlier characters, but there is a suspension here, a feeling of loss. This structure, though, nicely speaks to the loss of the girls, and allows that sense of incompletion to underscore the possibility that there may not be an ending at all, much less one that is fulfilling. AuszeichnungenPrestigeträchtige AuswahlenBemerkenswerte Listen
"One August afternoon, on the shoreline of the Kamchatka peninsula at the northeastern edge of Russia, two sisters, eight and eleven, go missing. In the ensuing months the police investigation turns up nothing. Echoes of the disappearance reverberate across a tightly woven community, with the fear and loss felt most deeply among its women. Connected by the crime: a witness, a neighbor, a detective, a mother. Social and ethnic tensions have long simmered in the region, and outsiders are often the first to be accused..."--Provided by publisher. Keine Bibliotheksbeschreibungen gefunden. |
Aktuelle DiskussionenKeineBeliebte Umschlagbilder
 Google Books — Lädt ...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyKlassifikation der Library of Congress [LCC] (USA)BewertungDurchschnitt: (3.88)
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Die Autorin Julia Phillips hat diese Geschichte auf eine ungewöhnliche Art erzählt. Jedes Kapitel ist mit einem Monatsnamen überschrieben und erzählt die Geschichte einer Person, bis sich dann nach einem Jahr der Kreis schließt. Für mich wirkte es wie eine Aneinanderreihung von Kurzgeschichten, die kaum Verbindung haben und die auch nicht zu Ende erzählt wurden.
Angekündigt wird das Buch mit dem Hinweis „literarischer Thriller“. Etwas Thrillerhaftes hatte die Geschichte für mich aber gar nicht. Streckenweise war es doch recht langatmig und vieles wird nur angedeutet. Der Grundton war recht deprimierend.
Interessant fand ich, mehr über das Leben und die Kultur in Kamtschatka zu erfahren, ein Gebiet, das wohl kaum einer kennt. Auch die Landschaft war gut und atmosphärisch beschrieben. Die Bewohner der Halbinsel sind irgendwie zerrissen, es gibt die Konflikte zwischen russischer und indigener Bevölkerung, Männern und Frauen, zwischen arm und reich, Tradition und Moderne, Stadt und Land.
Ich hatte meine Schwierigkeiten mit diesem Roman und musste mich immer wieder überwinden, das Buch zur Hand zu nehmen. Wenn ich dann aber wieder drin war, ging es. Die meisten Personen waren mir überhaupt nicht sympathisch und so ging mir dann auch ihr Schicksal nicht nahe. Ihr Denken und Handeln konnte ich meist nicht nachvollziehen.
Ich bin recht zwiespältig – einerseits packte mich die Geschichte nicht wirklich, andererseits habe ich dann über manches doch noch nachgedacht. Wirklich überzeugt bin ich aber nicht. (